


Terezi: Synchronize

by BrushBandit, gamblignant8, optimisticDuelist (lasciviousWildheart)



Series: Numbers of the Blind Prophets [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Making Out, Mind Meld, Transformation, it's kanaya maryam's universe and we're all just living in it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-09-28 04:35:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17176013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrushBandit/pseuds/BrushBandit, https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamblignant8/pseuds/gamblignant8, https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasciviousWildheart/pseuds/optimisticDuelist
Summary: Vriska, Terezi, Kanaya and Rose spend a much-needed evening in, and discover a great deal about one another's feelings.





	Terezi: Synchronize

**Author's Note:**

> “This is the new touch. The feeling of fingers pushing painlessly through our skin, the feeling of the muscle and fat, the weight of it, the intention: It's best friends forever. It's a first kiss. It's a love story.
> 
> It’s imaginable, but it doesn’t exist anywhere, not on any planet. We’re a dream; we’re becoming people no other people have ever been. A human that humans are not.
> 
> We reach out to each other.”  
> -We Know the Devil (and she is us.)

"Are you sure it's not just that you're SO hung up on your idea of what you SHOULD be that you can’t bring yourself to let go of it and relax as your honest self, even if the consequence is your inability to connect with people you care about despite the obvious mutual desire to connect?"

Rose and Vriska both sputter, stumble, and they might not be fully aflame but you can smell a bit of blush on the both of them. You’ve gotten so fucking insufferable with a girlfriend. You smirk, 'looking' directly at Rose and ignoring Vriska.

"You really are a lot like Dave. But I think you might be cuter."

“You know, in human culture, it would traditionally be considered a ‘mood-killer’ to reference someone’s brother while making a pass at them.”

You grinned a sharktoothed grin with a practically canine pant of laughter. “You’ve never done anything traditionally in your life, orange creamsicle. I doubt you’re going to start with the institution of marriage.”

Rose adopts a faux faint, putting the back of her hand against her forehead like she’d been afflicted with the vapors. “And now you denigrate the sanctity of my vows? Right here in front of my darling wife and your darling whatever?”

Vriska met Kanaya’s eyes, searching for some life raft in this sea of flighty broads and their snarky horseshit. But Kanaya, looser this evening with the effects of the high, provided no safe passage back to normal conversational territory.

“Dearest wife, it’s not the most unfounded of assumptions. I’ve seen the way you two look at each other.”

Vriska started and looked at Kanaya with the disdainful glare of a woman betrayed. Rose just smirked. The human girl sidled even closer to Vriska on the couch(!) and put a kitten-nailed hand up to Vriska’s cheek(!!), shooting a smoldering glance across the coffee table at Kanaya, sitting with tented fingers. “I’m sure you’ve given it a great deal of thought, dear,” Rose said, sliding her hand up Vriska’s flushed face to brush the base of her horn, “spending untold hours picturing just this scenario, no?”

You cackled, mouth open to get the best view. Vriska well and truly was tangled, deep in the web.

Kanaya deliberately crossed her legs, keeping her breathing even to keep her composure and some sense of upper hand. “I fear you may be scaring our guest, Rose dearest.”

That was the right thing to say to get Vriska to stop being an antlerbeast in buggylights. Always something to prove, and this exercise in proving herself brave began with Vriska leaning in for a hungry, sharp kiss that caught even Rose off guard.

* * *

Rose led Vriska’s makeout-drunk self off the couch, and your heart melted a bit hearing her surrounded by these goobers, completely showered with love.

These last few days with her have been something out of a fantasy, one you never let yourself have. Vriska has, uncharacteristically, not dragged you from interaction to interaction. This is the first evening you’ve spent out for more than a quick hello since she got back.

And it’s one that made you more excited than ever for what you’ve been hearing for a sweep about Rose working on.

You and Kanaya, both equally enjoying the shared secret you have over Serket, follow each of your respective dangerous lovebirds to the bedroom.

There, Vriska is sitting on the bed, now thoroughly confused as to why Rose has left her there instead of attending to her.

“Uh. Lalonde.” She’s looking at you and Kanaya, and it _is_ a bit awkward, both of you standing there, even if the two of you know what’s coming. You don’t exactly have a line here, and Kanaya clears her throat as Rose opens a drawer on her bureau.

Luckily, Rose Lalonde has never met a silence she couldn’t fill.

“We’re all very excited to have you back, my fellow Goddess of Light, but I do urge patience.” She’s fiddling, now, setting up a little altar. Not your style, but you thumb the end of your dragonshead cane and feel a bit of appreciation for commitment to a strong personal aesthetic.

She has dipped her finger in what you smell as rosewater and is drawing a circle in ground saffron on a white cotton cloth. At the center, she places a small gemstone.

“I’ve been working on this with some friends for a great deal of time. Part of a process of...reconciliation with another version of myself.” You smell Kanaya’s smile at that. Your vigil on the void has disconnected you from a lot of the gossip, but Jasprose _has_ kept you company — and abreast of the truly delectable situation unfolding between her and her alternate self — a few times.

“Don’t think I don’t remember our tabletop sessions on the meteor. I remember the ones with just the four of us, how much you enjoyed playing that drow, and Terezi that dragonborn.”

The gemstone is glowing purple. A shimmering light seems to be overtaking Rose. She turns to look at Vriska and you can smell on the air that the sclera in her eyes is has turned into a lemon meringue gold with a delicious grape jelly violet forming around the iris. You hear her shudder and you can tell from the way it echos around the room that she’s taking up more space now, taller. And, most deliciously of all, candy-corn horns are shimmering into existence on her head.

Rose makes a little trill you know a human can’t make, and it’s thrilling. She strains at her sari with new muscle. You grin, but you know this isn’t a gift for you.

Kanaya, next to you, has her mouth hanging open. This was for her. Knowing it was coming was no change to how much Kanaya is clearly stunned by seeing one of her first fantasies coming to life and beckoning her closer with a clawed hand.

“Told you to be patient,” Rose Lalonde says, her first words as a troll. She looks directly at Vriska. “Here’s a welcome-home present, you extravagant bitch: What would you like to be?”

“I...Uh,” Vriska’s mouth works for a moment, but whatever this weird magic shit Rose is into now is  _ strong,  _ and she’s already being cut off by another’s answer. You smell the thin black silk of Kanaya’s dress as it doesn’t so much stretch (it  _ flows,  _ actually) down from her, pooling at her feet and outwards like ink, the movement too fast to be so impossibly smooth and graceful. 

The small silver studs that dots it ride the black down the shape of her hips, down her long legs, and out across the floor like ( _stars_ ) tiny marbles, spinning and dancing as if floating in an ocean.

In an instant, the black sea of her has swept over your feet ( _it has a biting chill that makes you shudder, hungry for warmth, and it’s delicious_ ), raced over Vriska ( _you feel more than smell or hear her shiver, and...did she just **squeak**? Oh this **is** fun._) and streaks over the walls, painting them over with blank, infinite darkness. 

If that wasn’t weird enough, the white of her skin and the black of her hair, her lipstick, her eyes—all of that spreads _upwards,_ painting the upper halves of the walls and the ceiling a surreal white punctured by dots of shining ebony, making of the room a bizarre, inverted mirror. It is at once nowhere and everywhere, and all of it is Kanaya—she has consumed you, somehow, taken you where doors only open at the call of her will, a place that feels liminal, magical, _intimate_. 

But you and Vriska are but pebbles in the wake of Maryam, and the infinite waters of her take their time pooling around the room, taking it in all around you, eating towards the center.    
The center, where Rose sits, and you wonder if Kanaya can see it too: the way sheer surprise mixes with subtle annoyance at being shown up mixes with absolutely floored admiration that her weirdo vamp girlfriend ( _ **wife** , you remind yourself, and Vriska standing here kinda makes that mean something now that you can’t quite put words to_) is somehow getting _weirder_ mixes with a doomed, desperate desire to keep her poker face intact. 

Having a front row seat to Rose Lalonde’s mental gymnastics kind of makes being a Mind player worth it single-handedly, you think to yourself. You observe Kanaya and whatever stunned hesitance she had a moment ago is gone now. She’s been playing this game with Rose for years now, and she’s used to keeping her poise in the face of surprises. Her mouth splits into a smile, wide and sultry, and her eyes are wide the way you’ve only smelled them when she’s in the mood to bite for blood. Still, she doesn’t speak, and yet all eyes are on her now, the stage stolen from Rose Lalonde of all people gracefully and with apparently zero effort.

She gives it a solid second, enjoying the spotlight, making a quiet show of informing you all of who is truly the master. Then the black closes in all around Rose like a predator’s jaws snapping shut, and she hisses under her breath as the waters— _splash_? These aren’t metaphorical space waters, after all?—up and all around her, leaving her damp with splotches of black, clear fluid.

The sun sari, already drawn tight to the limit, is now drenched and hiding exactly jack and shit. Soft glimmers of white starlight stick to her in half a dozen places. Only now does Kanaya _tsk’_ softly, practically no smugness actually in the sound, and deign to move. She walks between Rose and Vriska with unperturbed elegance, and softly passes a hand through Rose’s wet hair, curling her fingers around the base of her troll horns.

She sits (half-lays, really) down on precisely nothing, and picks up Rose’s semantic thread seamlessly, weaving in her own, more dramatic flourish on top of it, looking directly at Vriska as she asks a question that is also a promise:    
“ _Where_ would you like to be?” 

Vriska doesn’t have words to respond. She feels the caress of Kanaya — the first one she ever let touch her, the first one who could ever calm the fire raging in her, the one whose desire she couldn’t see through the clouds of doom that plagued her youth — and it feels like there’s jade flowing over every inch of her skin, pumping through her heart to replace all the cerulean that’s ever bled from one of her many wounds. Her mind reaches out for Kanaya, and you can  _ feel  _ all of this, like it’s happening to you.

It is happening to you. You’re doing it. You’re watching it done. It happened sweeps ago. It will happen tomorrow. She touches you, and she gasps at the intrusion, and you are her and she is you and so are both of the others.

Everything in the universe hinges on the question Kanaya’s asked Vriska. You feel pulled towards them both with an unstoppable gravity you don’t feel like resisting.

Kanaya is unspooling, flowing out from within herself, sweeping us up and in and  towards her, inside her, together. Kanaya is unfurling like a flower, like moth wings batting the sun out of the sky. Kanaya is coming alight like the sun,  we are drowning in the dark and the light of her, and she is beautiful and devastating. Kanaya is within and without us, pulling us together, threading us into one cloth, one body. Time doesn't matter here. We can see every moment, every space, every memory. We see Terezi sitting in the forest, eyes on the egg, and we are the feeling in her heart that something better will come. We look out from behind every petal of every flower that Kanaya's ever planted, and we are the raindrops drenching Rose when she's brooding and dramatic and too fed up with listening to dry heaves and snoring to stay inside.

We stand in the past and walk in Vriska's boots and we throw the cadavers over the plank together, every last one of them. We are the words she tells herself to sleep at night, we are "You do what you must" and "This will be over" and "There is redemption." We stand in the present and remind her that it's gone now, that it's over now, that she found the guy who killed them with her hands before they were even born and killed him, for all of us. We stand in the future, wild and strange, when we have cracked every secret of this broken universe and figured out exactly how to fix it all, how to reach into the dead worlds and save every last soul ever left trapped in them, in the future when she has had every chance to truly make amends, to ask and be forgiven, and all that's left of the old nightmares is the meaningless language of his irrelevant name. And we will be together. We will be together. Amen.

VRISKA: It’s hard. 8eing a kid and growing up and then, like, growing up doesn’t fix anything.  
VRISKA: It’s hard and no8ody’s ever understood.  
THE EUMINEDES: 1 Know.  
KANAYA: I Have Always Felt One Step Away From Knowing You  
KANAYA: I Used To Feel Such Jealousy When You Would Open Up To Others While Staying So Closed Off From Me  
THE CLEMENTIA: But Th4t W4s So Long 4go  
THE CLEMENTIA: 4nd 1 Sp3nt So Long Y34rn1ng For You  
THE CLEMENTIA: 4nd 1 R3al1z3d Th4t Wh4t 1 R34lly W4nt3d W4s For You To F33l Und3rstood 4t 4ll  
THE LILITH: There’s always 8een this tempest inside me.  
VRISKA: I’ve never 8een able to really put it into words.  
ROSE: I’ve never been able to make the words cease.  
THE LILITH: It’s...8een different with you.  
THE NORN: 1t’s 4lw4ys 833n D1ff3r3nt Tog3th3r.

A thrum through you and Vriska is outside, different again, in your arms, impossibly small and fragile.

She looks up at you. Meets your sight-unsight. Sees through you and comes away from the experience with nothing but want.

“It’s never felt right being me,” she says, from a universe away and right up against your ear, simultaneously. “But it...starts to. Around you.”

And suddenly you’re just you, just Terezi again, blessed unsight back to save you from flooded senses, remembering the emptiness you told Vriska only she could fill. Not complete you, just keep you functioning.

Kanaya is focusing on you, now, and you feel the sensation of warm, harmless sun on your scales. You feel her hands stroke where your wings meet your back, and she is atop you, astride you, as your powerful frame flies through the air, larger than yourself, the dragon you always knew you were.

_You Got What You Were Looking For, Pyrope_. The question comes to you wordlessly as you soar. _I Did Too_.

The colors of fields and impossible oceans swirl beneath you, a delicious symphony of flowerbeds and pink coral and green, green,  _ jade _ swirling around your forked tongue, withstanding all your fire to kiss you deeply, dwarfed by your size, held in your massive claws, but not at all frightened.  _ We Have To Decide Who We Are Now _ . And you are two dragons spiraling through the air in flight, dipping in and out of fire that cannot hurt you, tails twisted together and fangs lashing until you are one.

THE CLEMENTIA: Th1s 1s Th3 Pow3r W3 H4v3  
KANAYA: You Learned To Forgive Vriska  
TEREZI: YOU G4V3 ROS3 R3G4RD FOR TH3 B1GG3R PURPOS3 W3 4LL H4D  
TEREZI: T4UGHT H3R NOT TO F34R 1T  
THE CLEMENTIA: M3rcy C4n S4v3 H3r  
THE CLEMENTIA: 1t C4n S4v3 M3

And you are wrapped around Rose and Vriska, the only horde you could ever ask for, greater than any pile of gold and riches you could guard from knights errant. They are your treasure, and you can create the space for them to do more than survive.

All four of you, tumbling through all the things that ever have been, all the shapes you could ever have, all the feelings you now know you mutually wish to share?

You can thrive.

And you’re back to standing there. Planted firmly in place, three of you standing around a four-poster bed on which Vriska sits. The sudden confinement of gravity, of physicality, would feel suffocating if you weren’t so empowered. Kanaya has drawn back completely, shifting and settling into herself with a prim modesty that is absolutely  _ delightful _ coming from someone whose first thought was to become your entire universe.

Rose and Vriska look breathless, flushing violet and cerulean, respectively. You just smirk. She’s good.

Kanaya goes — glides, floats — to Vriska’s side on the bed, and gestures Rose to her, too. You step up, lean your cane on the side of the bed, and flop onto the foot of it gracelessly, just to spoil the moment.

Her melodic voice is low and quiet now. “I wanted to check in and make sure you’re okay. I may have gotten carried away.”

Rose just cracks up, completely, laughing too hard to respond.

Vriska falls backward onto the bed and effortlessly takes your hand in hers, which still makes your pusher do a flip. “You think????????” she says to the ceiling, exasperatedly. 

You think you’ve fallen in love with Kanaya Maryam this evening. You never, ever disliked her. But this side of her moves past  _ pretty and funny friend  _ to something more like  _ a series of beautifully and intricately tied knots you have a sudden interest in unraveling.  _ “Personally, _I_ quite enjoyed the show, Miss Wintergreen Spearmint.”

“That’s _Mrs. Wintergreen Spearmint_ , Pyrope,” Rose has finally composed herself enough to say. That earns _you_ laughing, too, and the four of you settle into a lazy tangle of physical contact on the bed you wouldn’t’ve expected coming into this night. Some seer you are, you never let yourself think things are going to be as good as they are.

**Author's Note:**

> [@gamblignant8](https://twitter.com/gamblignant8)   
>  [@RoseOfNobility](https://twitter.com/RoseOfNobility)   
>  [@BrushBanditKC](https://twitter.com/BrushBanditKC)   
> 


End file.
